Culture matters. It is a simple, enduring message that applies to virtually everything in today’s world, but it could not be more relevant than when it comes to driving economic value for stakeholders and shareholders of merger-and-acquisition deals. When integrating the workforce of a newly formed organization and protecting reputation risk, ignoring culture is not an option.

In a workforce context, culture is about individual behaviors that deliver business outcomes and how operational drivers can be leveraged to reinforce those behaviors. Cultural alignment is critical for effective organization change in M&A. This alignment calls for a clear business strategy, an understanding of deal rationale and the requisite integration risks in order to successfully execute any transaction.

Culture establishes the foundation for the operating model, which in turn defines the requirements for the talent platform — such as the skills required, expected behaviors, and drivers like pay and rewards plans. Outcomes and results are what matter, so they must be measured to direct any actions required to mitigate integration risks.

New research from Mercer has revealed the importance of mitigating culture risk to drive M&A deal value, with key findings from 1,438 voices from 54 countries who collectively worked on 4,000+ deals on both the buy and sell sides in the past 36 months. Insights were gleaned from four stakeholder groups — M&A Advisors, Business Leaders, HR Professionals and Employees.In all, these stakeholder groups work for companies employing more than 43 million peoplearound the world.

Mercer’s survey found that 43 percent of M&A transactions worldwide experienced serious cultural misalignment which caused deals to be delayed or terminated, or purchase prices to be negatively impacted. In addition, 67 percent experienced delayed synergy realization due to culture issues.

In addition, 61 percent of respondents selected “How leaders behave, not just what they say” as the number one driver of organizational culture. “Governance and decision-making process” (53%) and “Communication style and transparency” (46%) also ranked highly. Deal makers also said that 30 percent of deals fail to ever achieve financial targets due to problems arising from cultural misalignment, including productivity loss, flight of key talent and customer disruption.